Reptile room and animal update :)

[WhompingWillow]

Thought I'd do a quick update on some of our animals and our reptile room now that it's ~95% complete and mostly organized! We've been working really hard on home projects (part of why I've been so absent here), and one of those projects was improving this room.

Please excuse how bare bones all of the cages are. We had a nasty surprise last month when we discovered mites in several enclosures. I'm not 100% sure how we picked them up, as we hadn't added a new animal in I think close to a year(?). Our best guess is that we might have gotten some hitch hikers from our local science center, which has several snakes/reptiles they take out for the kids to see/touch/hold. :/ So we are being abundantly cautious with the paper towels and repeated mite treatments until we are beyond sure the mites are eradicated, as it is a royal pain in the butt to have to clean out and treat that many snakes/enclosures.

The reptile room is fairly small, probably meant to be an office, so we had to get creative with space. We really like the steel component shelving units we have because they're lightweight, sturdy, and easy to assemble. The biggest decision we've made for this space is to transition all of our BPs into a rack system, specifically a Freedom Breeder, which we are completely happy with. The snakes seem to be happy, too.

Going to a rack allowed us to get rid of several glass tanks and move all of our boas into PVC enclosures. Down the line we'll have to decide the direction we want to go for our boas and carpet pythons (ie, do we put the boas in a super big FB rack or leave them in PVC, do some reconfiguring to get PVC cages to fit for the carpet pythons, etc), but we have some time until we need to make any changes. The type-A in me also wants to eventually replace the white Animal Plastics cage and Boa Master cage with ones from Reptile Basics, but that's more of a wish list item than a necessity.

I really like having a dedicated space for the reptiles. With the room being so small and having some heat lamps, we have had no problem with ambient temps. I added a large humidifier to help increase humidity, which has really helped. We chose to do 25% ventilation on the FB tubs since the room can be dry, and the humidity inside the tubs has been holding right around 60%.

As for animal updates, nothing major or too exciting. Grimm has calmed down quite a bit since moving into a PVC cage. I think he appreciates having more space. He will very occasionally strike at the doors, but a lot less than he used to. We can also usually get him out of the cage now for some handling without him being a spaz.

Probably the most relieving news is that Bridget, our very fussy IJ carpet, is officially, finally, reliably eating and has been for a couple of months! (Knock on wood!!) It took more than a YEAR, but now she is eating on her own every meal. She missed one while in shed but thankfully ate no problem the next offering, unlike when we first got her. Just last night we gave her two instead of one fuzzy mice for the first time, and I'm hopeful that if she can keep it up, we'll soon be able to get her on hoppers and beyond.

I'll try to remember to get some snake photos next time they're out!

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